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Apparently that’s what I did, although I never intended to do that. I love books. I love to read and if I had to give up reading, I would truly be miserable. For me, it was trips to the library when I was little and filling my tote bag with as many books as they would let me check out for the week. I would lose myself in the stories. If my parents wanted to punish me, taking away my books would have been the absolute worst punishment for me. I would rush through my homework in order to get to a book. I would ask for just five more minutes before bedtime so that I could get to the end of the chapter. When I went to college, reading for pleasure took a back seat to reading for school and summertime was really the only time I had for reading. After college, it was back to the library and loading up on books to take me through the week. The local pharmacy had a small section of books and I would spend a few dollars a month on a new paperback, and when I finished, I would donate it to our library.

It wasn’t until I got married that I began visiting book stores and purchasing hardback books. My husband and I would say that one day, when we settled down in one place, we would have a room in our house that would be the library. In my mind, I can see it perfectly. There will be a wall of shelves with a rolling ladder and books filling the shelves from top to bottom. And there would be a chaise and comfy chairs to curl up in with a cup of coffee or tea and just lose oneself in the story.

We would visit the bookstore and spend an hour searching for books. Sometimes I would have a list of ones that I wanted to check out while other times I just looked for books that caught my interest. The great things about bookstores are you could spend time reading the first few pages and if my interest was caught, then I might splurge, but we had a budget and sometimes, no matter how good something was, it might have to wait a month or two until I could get it.

A sad day for me was when our local book store closed. It meant that we had to travel out-of-town, so it wasn’t somewhere we could drop in on a rainy weekend. We had to plan to go there, so some of the spontaneity was gone. We would have a list of books in the car that we wanted to look for in case we ended up near a book store. My husband knew I loved to read, so he and my son gave me a Kindle for Mother’s Day in 2011 and it was a new way to buy books. Suddenly I was reading genres I never read before and exploring authors I never heard of. My go to authors seemed to take a back seat and I became cheap about buying books. Why does $6.99 for an e-book seem like a lot of money when I used to pay $19.99 for a hard cover book in the book store and didn’t think twice about it? I never thought I would stop buying books, but soon I bought less and less and now my book buying is done on my Kindle. I literally have hundreds of books on my e-reader, but I’m at least 8 books behind in JD Robb’s Death series.

A few months ago, my husband and I decided to explore one of the historical areas near us. One place that we stopped at was Boonsboro, Maryland, which is where one of my favorite authors, Nora Roberts/JD Robb, opened businesses based upon characters and settings from her books. There is an inn, pizza parlor and a book store. We were able to stop at the book store and I picked up some of the books that I’m missing. It’s a start and one that I plan on continuing. I just have to start visiting the local bookstores again.